SEO Changes: How Users Became Top Priority These Days

SEO changes are inevitable. During the many years that it is being used to rope in website visitors to gain footing, innovations and evolutions are only natural to transpire. And one of these evolutions are the shift of priority of SEO endeavors. During its initial establishment and eventual thriving, SEO was just being accomplished to get audience no matter the cost. But now, everyone had learned that User Experience is the paramount to having an authentic, actually long-lasting SEO engagement.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see how SEO had changed these past years for its users and how you can tweak your own mechanics to better fit your audience!

The Refurbished User Experience

If you have been using the web in the early 2000s, you would remember how bulky interfaces look, how dizzying colors are, and how overwhelming fonts can be. Today, this would not work and your bounce rate would skyrocket, meaning your SEO will suffer terribly—simply because they do not make for a satisfying user experience. As time goes on, people’s tastes have become more sophisticated, not just in design but in content as well.

Gone are the tacky designs and the less-than-filtered content, SEO changes paved way for brimming with sleek designs and actually engaging and useful content. Specifically, websites now are made sure to fit in different devices and we will be sure seeing more of this in the future due to Google’s mobile-first indexing.

UX design or how your website looks and is navigated have also became more complex than before, from knowing your audience to setting up your site’s wireframe, the strategies have turned multi-faceted to ensure that the journey’s user is a worthwhile one.

The Benefits of Focusing on Users

When the needs of a user are fulfilled, expect for trust to grow. With this, they will come go further your services, will come back for more, and tell people about the customer satisfaction you provided. In retrospect, an outstanding user experience calls for valuable returns for your business because of brand loyalty and even if some won’t go ahead with what you offer, there will still be an imprint that might prove useful in the future. According to studies, good user experience in the website can produce conversation rates up to 400%. This is one of the best benefits to come out of the many SEO changes over the years.

Users are a vital part for a successful SEO, even if you have the most organized system, you will not garner any return of investment (ROI) if you do not have a connection to your potential users. Digital marketing is for people and about people so if you’re still adhering to some SEO changes then you are definitely falling behind. Did you know that only 55% of companies perform user experience testing for their website? Step up, do not follow the herd: instead, be the one the people will follow.

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Google’s Update for April 2015: The Rise of Mobile Friendly Websites

Google announced last February 2015 that they will include mobile-friendliness as a factor in determining rankings. Here is Google’s official statement: “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on our search results.” If you haven’t read the entire update yet, we will break it down for you.

• Google will begin to use the data gathered from indexed apps.

• What are indexed apps?

These are mobile applications that are “indexed” by Google. There are series of steps that must be done for App Indexing. Google would show the apps alongside the search result. See below.

(Image from Google Developers)

If you want to learn how to index your app, Google has written a guide about it here.

• It will have a significant impact in our mobile search results.

The point of this phrase is that Google will be penalizing sites that are not “mobile-friendly”. We do not know yet the real scope of the penalty, but we know that it would be big. During SMX Munich, Zineb from Google told the community that the penalty would be heavier than the former updates.

Will the update hurt my desktop search results?

• No, the algorithm focuses on mobile search results.

My mobile traffic is insignificant. Why should I make my site mobile-friendly?

• It is safer and wiser to make your site mobile friendly because smartphone mobile access is continually on the rise. Take a look at Rand Fishkin’s Moz.com. His mobile traffic only accounts for 1% of the visits. Yet, he is working to make his site mobile-friendly – a perfect example of “thinking ahead.

We are only a few days away from Google’s update. Create a game plan, update your website, and do whatever you can to remain ahead of the competition.

Need help on making a mobile-friendly website? This guide published by Google can help you.